The proliferation of video sharing through websites provides numerous opportunities for users to collaborate and experience videos in online communities. Video hosting websites allow users to upload, view, and rate videos. Users browsing a video hosting website can locate videos of interest by, for example, searching for videos, browsing directories, or sorting by ratings.
User rating of videos provides a way to complement video with useful information. However, because conventional systems allow user rating only of a video as a whole, it cannot be determined which segments of the video the users found particularly interesting. This is especially problematic in light of increasingly large video length maximums allowed by video sharing websites, which leads to the presence of long videos, only a small portion of which may be interesting to most users. In addition, there is no way to navigate videos to find the most popular segments of a video. Although a user may wish to view only the most popular segments of the video, the user is obliged to view the entire video because the most popular parts of the video have not been determined. This results in considerable waste of time and user frustration.